Jay Heikes:
Second Wave
January 24—February 22, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, January 24 from 5—7pm

Adams and Ollman is pleased to present Second Wave, a solo exhibition by Jay Heikes (b. 1975, Princeton, NJ; lives in St. Paul, MN and works in Minneapolis, MN). The exhibition, an immersive installation featuring new sculptural objects and sound, opens with a reception on Friday, January 24 from 5–7pm and continues through February 22, 2025.

Heikes is well-known for his world-building and expansive exhibitions that span multiple media—painting, drawing, performance, sculpture, and installation. His work alludes to various histories and events, from personal narratives to cultural milestones to geological events. Heikes continues his interventions into the way we experience and understand the arc of human existence. Rather than following a rational or linear timeline, his work creates circular narratives that fold back upon themselves, suggesting an intricate alchemy of time.

In Second Wave, Heikes explores the paradoxical relationship between human progress and extinction. The artist examines a central dissonance: how advancement and decline occur simultaneously, with innovations that propel us forward also bringing us closer to collapse.

This conflict materializes in the exhibition through a discordant soundscape engineered by the artist from various homemade musical instruments—strings, ceramic whistles, and a finger piano. Heikes translates mood into both sound and form through an array of ingeniously repurposed materials. While his objects echo traditional musical instruments, they maintain a deliberately improvised, provisional quality. These experimental sound-making devices are complemented by functional paintings that serve as acoustic panels, alongside a sculptural installation featuring modified music stands displaying prints of seismographic readings rendered as musical notation.

Drawing inspiration from Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Arte Povera and Russian Constructivism, as well as analog sensibilities, Second Wave is part science, part speculation. Together, the objects and haunting sounds form a sonic terrain that accompanies us to the edge of civilization and the end of time itself.

Heikes has been featured in solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions including the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, CA; the Aspen Art Museum, CO; and the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, PA. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY. He was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, curated by Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Heikes holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the University of Michigan.

Select Works

Jay Heikes
Ubu, 2025
ceramic
6h x 9 1/2w x 13d in
15.24h x 24.13w x 33.02d cm
JH_011


Jay Heikes
Tines Box, 2024
wood, sand, wood glue, latex paint, aluminum, copper, brass, steel, acoustic pickup, pyrite
44h x 54w x 25 1/2d in
111.76h x 137.16w x 64.77d cm
JH_004


Jay Heikes
Church Bells, 2024
stainless steel, copper, golf ball, plastic
dimensions variable
JH_005 


Jay Heikes
Wave Machine, 2024
copper BBs, scientific sieves with metal and fabric screens, microphone clip
12 3/4h x 9w x 9d in
32.38h x 22.86w x 22.86d cm
JH_006


Jay Heikes
Second Wave (Oscilloscope Readings), 2025
digital video transferred to DVD on CRT monitor with DVD player and speakers
TRT: 1:41:33
JH_007


Jay Heikes
Jester Whistle, 2024
ceramic
5 3/4h x 4w x 11d in
14.61h x 10.16w x 27.94d cm
JH_014


Jay Heikes
Hollywood Freeway, 2024
oil paint and water-based ink on nylon screen
45 1/4h x 33 1/4w x 1 7/8d in
114.94h x 84.45w x 4.76d cm
JH_016

Jay Heikes
The Sports Writer, 2015
pencil and ink on paper
50 3/8h x 87 1/8w in
127.95h x 221.30w cm
JH.12097